As an entrepreneur, you wear two important hats: management and leadership. You put on the management hat as you run the day-to-day business operations. The leadership hat you don as you set the vision and the mission of the organization and take it along the path established by your strategic plan. The challenge today is the meaning of strategic.
Three major factors in the current business environment are contributing to a rethink of strategic planning in today’s organizations: the rapid change in technology and its influence on business, the growing diversity in the nation’s workforce and the knowledge shortages induced by the rapid retirement of the baby boomers. With all of these taking place concurrently, the leader of today is being called upon to position the organization to adapt to change rather than drive relentlessly towards a staked out vision.
The entire organization needs to be redesigned to be adaptable as opposed to being mission oriented. No longer can we afford to sit and develop a strategic plan to guide the company over the three to five year period. We can’t even be sure of the next six months much less the next three years. Strategic is now and dealing with today’s change. Today’s leader needs to be able to fly at forty thousand feet , see the forest and then immediately swoop down and walk among the trees and implement the fixes needed now.
Today’s current pace of change demands fast action. We can no longer take the time to endlessly debate the issues. Leadership needs to step in and be decisive. Whether we like it or not, strategic has evolved to become operational and the operational strategy needs to be executed now.
